Scientist, Mentor, and Mother
Molecular Epidemiologist Helen Meier’s journey balancing life and career
—By Tommy Karadimas
Getting your postdoc and launching a career in academia? Tough. Doing it while being a mom? Even tougher. This is only a piece of the fascinating story of Dr. Helen Meier, an epidemiologist here at UM at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). She may be known for her influential work on health inequalities and aging, but many are unaware of the journey that got her to where she is, as well as other important aspects of her life, including being a mother and teacher mentoring the next generation of epidemiologists.
Meier’s story
Having always been interested in medicine and public health, Meier was a typical pre-med at the University of Virginia, except that she studied Human Biology, an interdisciplinary major, and instead of taking upper-level science courses needed for a Bachelor of Science, she took classes in the humanities to get a Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Bioethics, which she obtained in 2006.
She got into Bioethics and thought that she wanted to pursue this field by obtaining Juris Doctor and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees, and eventually working as a lawyer in hospitals. She worked at a law firm after college as a legal assistant to see if that was something she was interested in, but hated it. She knew that it was science all the way, and the science of public health is Epidemiology. She shadowed a hospital epidemiologist at UM Hospital, working on infection prevention in hospital outbreaks. She specifically wanted to do Molecular Epidemiology, becoming an expert on the biology behind public health policies, such as quarantine guidelines in outbreak situations.
She graduated with an MPH in Hospital and Molecular Epidemiology at UM’s School of Public Health in 2010. Although there was not much demand for epidemiologists due to the small amount of global infectious disease outbreaks (a bit ironic now), one class in the program called Social Epidemiology completely shifted the focus of what she wanted to do. She had never considered deeply how health varies by socioeconomic status, wealth, race, and ethnicity. She worked for a year as a research coordinator to get more research experience and started a PhD program at UM School of Public Health in 2011, obtaining a PhD in Epidemiologic Sciences in 2015. “I was trying to bring the social and the biology together—how social vulnerabilities become biological vulnerabilities that result in health disparities.”
She was reckoned with a choice after obtaining her PhD. Should she work in academia, industry, or government? She was not convinced by academia, but wanted to leave the door open, so she did a sixteen-month postdoc at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and National Institute on Aging. The NIEHS exposed her to a lot of the environmental determinants of health, including lead and pollutant exposure. She then got her first faculty position as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) in 2016, and started to build her career there. She really liked the school because it focused on improving health inequalities. She was there for about four-and-a-half years until she came back to UM as an Assistant Research Scientist in the ISR, and has been working here ever since.
Academia and motherhood
As an academic, there is this whole question of when to have children. Do you do it as a PhD student? Do you do it as a postdoc? Do you do it as a junior faculty member?
Additionally, an unfortunate commonplace for women when applying to various schools and positions is being compelled to hide having a family and kids due to bias within the publishing and career pipeline, which has been shown to be extremely pervasive in academia. Many scrub their social media of all their pictures and relationship statuses so as to appear to have “no strings attached.” Meier did not follow this practice.
She applied for the Milwaukee job when she was eight months pregnant, and got the notice that she was selected for an interview a week after her daughter was born. UWM wanted to schedule her as soon as possible to get out to Milwaukee, and her response was “I just gave birth, I will take your last possible interview day.” She interviewed for that job six weeks postpartum.
Interviewing for a faculty job is a rigorous process, with two days of all-day interviews and a day allocated to give a talk about one’s research and where it headed. She had to tell the faculty chair who organized her schedule that she just had a baby and they had to build in pumping breaks. “Trying to fly under the radar with this was out the window.” She also had to meet with students during the interview process, and they always asked what she did in her spare time. She responded with, “Well up until a couple of weeks ago I liked to hike and run, but now I am just trying to keep a tiny human alive.”
Looking back on it, she thinks, “What an idiot.” If she had to give advice to her former self, she would say, “You just have to take that time. Your whole world completely changes in a whole instant.”
She said it is weird to be a mother in academia. She remembers once there was a schoolwide graduation party at UWM and she picked her daughter up from daycare and brought her to the party because it was just cake and ice cream and nothing fancy. The dean of the school came up to her and said “Is childcare not available today? Why is your daughter here?” She embraces being a mother and never tries to hide it.
She thinks this has helped her role as an instructor because given UWM’s access mission, so many students are parents, first generation, or were working and then came back to school. She felt that since she appeared human to her students, they have developed better relationships. “I’m a real person.” Some classes often start off like this: “My daughter did not sleep well last night. If I am talking out of my ass, sorry. We are here. We will try to make it work.”
She thinks that we need more of that—to humanize each other and respect each other and realize that we are all going through stuff. “I give you grace, you give me grace.”
Work-life balance
Meier’s philosophy behind balancing work and life is simple. Unless there is a tight deadline, she never works on the weekends or at night. “I try to treat my job like a job.” She started this routine as a PhD student, and knew that if she did not develop some sort of balance, her career could easily become all consuming.
A major test of her work-life balance was the Covid-19 pandemic. Her daughter was three-and-a-half years old and in Montessori school, then everything shut down. Her husband works for GE healthcare, responsible for building healthcare equipment such as respirators. With the extensive global need for respirators near the beginning of the pandemic, GE pulled him from his desk job to work second shift (1 pm – 1 am) in the factory. She was teaching, and all of her research stopped. She told her faculty chair that she could not do admissions and just was like “I cannot, there’s no time.” She was glad that she advocated for herself. She also said that she was lucky to have her parents close by so they could help with child care when she and her husband were busy.
Teaching the next generation
“I would not be where I am today without extraordinary mentors and it is super important to continue this cycle,” she says. When she was at Milwaukee, a lot of her students were the first in their families to go to college. As a result, many had imposter syndrome, a common theme among first-generation students throughout higher education. For her, the biggest thing was to empower people, to show her students that they could do it and how it was done. Many of her students have gone on to publish articles in journals and present their work at conferences.
To her, the fields of academia, data analysis, and public health are completely accessible to anybody. “Anybody can do this. You just need to know the behind the scenes and the tools and how the system works. Academia is a game. You just have to teach people how to play it.” She wants people to know that this field is accessible no matter who you are or where you come from. This is something you can do. That’s always been her orientation to it. For the students that she mentors, she just wants to give them a chance if they want it.
Final thoughts
For Meier, many days may be spent scouring deep through complex epidemiological publications and performing statistical analyses on large sets of data, but her life is far from boring. She has had a fascinating journey through discovery and motherhood, instilling in her a passion to learn and help others here at UM. Her career in Epidemiology is far from over, and she continues to be extraordinarily capable in training students, and inspiring others to follow suit in both her research, as well as the way she leads life, being a mother, and balancing all of the challenges that her life has to offer.
Featured image: Dr. Helen Meier; Photo credit, UM ISR